hnriot

It's not that the style was "wrong", it's that anyone who writes java and doesn't know something as basic about the language as the style conventions. I would also reject a candidate that didn't know the rudimentary stuff. What else don't they know? Especially for Java, not so much for JS, but Java is an enterprise language which means you'll be one cog in a big machine and you need to know and respect the coding conventions to stand any chance of being an efficient member of their team.

I would actually say that coding style is a big predictor of how likely an interview candidate would turn out to be a good developer in a team. Casing isn't irrelevant at all, it's a predictor. It has nothing to do with piousness. Another indicator of bad java developers (in my experience) is those that write near 'c', lots of for(int i=0; i<.... and not using language constructs that are their to reduce bugs. Another good indicator I have found (in java) is little to no use of 'final'.

If you'd have prefaced your coding in the interview with "I'm not familiar with Java, I use X, but I'll take a stab at the problem" I'm sure the interviewer would have been less worried about your style, but if you claim to know a language, you'll know the conventions too.

PHP is just a language that so many of the so called programmers here like to bash. I doubt many have even used it, they take a quick look at the hello world and just write it off. But in reality, the language makes so little difference to most projects, it's more about the ecosystem, the jars for java, the packages for python, these are what propel a language to productivity highs. Imagine python without BeautifulSoup or numpy or scipy or any of a hundred packages I use daily. Imagine Java/scala without Mahout etc etc. The actual syntax is almost irrelevant to anyone that can articulate good software design in code.

It's like giving a pencil to Picasso and suddenly implying anything he draws will be shit just because he's not using paint. Utterly ridiculous arguments by the pseudo intellectuals here trying to convince themselves how smart they are for using Haskell. Meanwhile, real software developers just get on with writing good clean code in whatever language they want.

please, this is getting old. Haskell is one of those languages for people who want to show off how clever they are instead of just getting on with developing applications that actually do useful things efficiently.

I think you're totally wrong about the interpretation, but who knows what Struth meant if anything by these. Unlike maybe Stephen Shore or even Alec Soth, Struth's photographs seem to me to be much more just about the equipment. He seems to think that anything taken on large format and printed really big is art. Personally I find his work bland and utterly devoid of anything even remotely interesting. The author of this piece has the advantage of fond memories of those banal forest scenes, but to the me they are without artistic merit. I don't like any of Struth's work though. He's a fraud in my opinion.

And as for this artistic interpretation "Imagine [as] if it were an abstract painting" is a ridiculous one. It's as valid as me saying imagine it were actually an interesting photograph.

Then again, the world needs art historians as about as much as birds need bird watchers.

One thing we can agree on, the CfA2 Great Wall is awesome.

"There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve." - you only have to look at who originally funded [1] Facebook to see why.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies-fun...

it can also be a big red flag, people who can't stick to something for any length of time are either consistently bad at picking companies to work for, or the companies they pick find they aren't what they had hoped. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the next employer.

but statistics shows that this person will likely leave anyway, the 15% provides only very short term relief from the real reasons why someone wanted to leave in the first place.

if I see someone in this position who works for me, I immediately start looking for their replacement.

you work only 8-9 hours a day and have just a 45 minute commute and you're whining about it? For someone in their twenties that makes no sense to me. I'm twice as old as you, work longer hours than you, have a longer commute and manage to raise a daughter and contribute to my github projects when she's asleep. I'm no better than anyone, my point is that you sound so whiny and entitled. If you don't like your job then change it, but you definitely don't sound like someone who would do very well going out alone.

comparing this to IPython Notebook is a big stretch and an insult to MATLAB and IPython notebook. There's no way this would have ever come out of PARC, you're exaggerating Davis's work. Also, it's impossible to "look past the religious stuff" - it's part of, all of TempleOS.

To me this is just a crazy guy who's been tinkering with 80s technology while the rest of the world has moved on. I feel bad for him , but I just don't buy the "powerful idea with serious applications"

Fair enough, we don't agree but this is a free country after all. And besides, who cares what either of us think about this point, history will decide. Photography is definitely morphing into something new with technology playing a larger role over time. The written word on the internet isn't really a good analogy, a better one would be software that takes the written word and embellishes it with similes and metaphors generated from HMM algorithms, or rewriting adjectives with embellished phrases for you, or converting it to iambic pentameter. These are the literary metaphors of photo filters. Can you imagine picking up a copy of Gravity's Rainbow and having to chose between the Ludwig, Aden or Mayfair filter. One has Slothrop not rescue Katje from the octopus. That's what these photo filter apps are doing to photography. Maybe people don't care, maybe there's layers to photography and there's no spill between them, like you say, maybe these layers are isolated from one another. I like it when the name changes so we don't call them photo filters but something more lomo to show it's not meant to be photography. If he were dead, Jeff Wall would be rolling in his grave.

You're going there, you're criticizing my punctuation and capitalization skills???

As for your point, it makes no sense. I mean, it sounds fine, and it reads just perfectly, the capitalization and punctuation is almost spot on, but there's no substance to it. I don't worry what others think, that would be as dumb as another photo filter app. The written word will manage just fine long after we're both pushing up daisies.

I think you might have been trying to make some kind of snide remark comparing the written word's reputation to the plight that photograph has taken in recent years. That might be something that would be interesting to talk about. Twitter has done to the written word much the same that Instagram (et al) has for photography. There's a lexicon all to twitter, it has its own vocabulary, it's own grammar and so on. Anyone, like me, who does machine learning using twitter is painfully aware of how the authors of twitter have degraded and abused the language as a "serious medium for expression.", Photo filter apps have done the same for photography making it harder for actual photographers to be taken seriously in the art world.

Actually, I think I read too much into what you wrote, I think it just didn't say much of anything at all, just a pretentious attempt at an insult. Let me guess, a liberal arts major :)

@dang, what are you suggesting I didn't follow? I don't see your point. Just because I think these me-to apps are a stupid waste of time is just my opinion, some people will share it and some won't, but why does having that opinion violate your guidelines. Maybe you should read them, or be specific about what you're objecting to.

I was respectful, I respectfully think this app is worthless. I suggested alternatives, like not applying filters and taking better photos. I presume you believe me to be gratuitously negative. First, don't use adverbs, second it's not unwarranted, we just need to stop making more of this shit.

Please! Seriously.

what you're describing isn't photography, but graphic design. That's fine, and of course people are free to corrupt their images as much as they want, but we really don't need another app for this, there are already hundreds of them and they all do the same stuff.

As for the OP suggesting these are works of art, yeah right.

These move photography away from being an accepted form of art, not towards it, these filter apps take photography more and more into the world of cheap throw-away effects. There's nothing new here, nothing that creates any real artistic value, it's just pixel pollution.

Along with t clarity slider in LR these apps are doing so much harm to the reputation of photography in the art world.

I know it's a trend, but that doesn't mean we need more stupid filter apps.

Does the world really need more photo filter apps?

In nearly every case, and in all of the examples, these filters have degraded the images substantially. I guess some people might find these fun, but don't we already have enough photo filter apps?

this is cool, but you can do the same with beautifulsoup and textblob in far fewer lines of code and you wouldn't need any web services. if textblob isn't your thing there's plenty of svm implementations out there.

for more interesting sentiment analysis approaches check out sentence vectors, that's the current bleeding edge of research in this area.

most sentiment analysis systems need to use an ensemble classifier because the domain of the text is very important. identifying the domain and using the appropriate domain specific model is important.

I do need JQuery because I want to focus on the application and not nuances of different js implementations. And I want to use the simple selector mechanisms. Then there's plugins, I use those too and many assume/require JQuery.

So no, I disagree. Stupid article.

Over the years I've enjoyed Dr Dobbs, but like most magazines they have become less and less relevant with google+stackoverflow+wikipedia. Over the years Dr Dobbs has added things to my repertoire of software knowledge, but I have to say Wikipedia has done more in recent years.

I can't think of a single magazine I've seen in recent years.

I still miss BYTE

advertising does more than sell things directly, brand recognition is another big purpose.

this is a very old page, it uses a very basic approach, it's highly computationally expensive to support edit distances beyond 2 (exponentially expensive) so the word length has to be kept small. This makes phraseslikethishardtobreakup.

Today's google spelling uses vastly more sophisticated approaches with gobs of data at it's disposal.

someone should write a bot to merge this into wikipedia.

did you apply for a position that asked for a CS degree? It was remiss of the company not to spot that earlier and save wasting theirs and your time.

I would never consider a candidate for a software engineering role that didn't have at least a CS degree. Possibly, EE, but nothing else. I have learned this the hard way, while others have learned to code they very often do so with little regard for design abstractions that are taught in school. Another reason for this requirement is the prescreening that comes with the CS degree. For example, an MIT CS grad has gone through rigorous testing for four plus years, far more than any two hour interview process ever could. I've never hired an MIT grad that didn't work out great. Ditto for some other schools, but especially so for MIT.

my takeaway was amazed that something posted in "the kitchen" is even read by anybody. For a technology company that's a pretty low tech multicast.

as for the actual point of the article, it seems highly inefficient to post problems and assume the right (interested) people will take them on. The obvious problems with this is scaling, and how do you account for people not working on the things that they were supposed to be doing. Basically, it's only something tenable in very few situations and only when a company is at a certain size. It wouldn't work today, for the most obvious reason that Google has a lot of kitchens!

I think you mean to say patently, but aside from that mistake I just don't see what you're saying, clearly CA has better weather, it's not a matter of being a "possible exception", the rest well, Cambridge has some decent beers it's true, I lived and worked there for a couple years, but the micro breweries in CA are better. SFO is much more reliable to fly in an out of, I should know, I flew into and out of Logan so many times and countless times flights are cancelled. By the time I'd get to SFO it would be clear blue skies and uneventful arrivals. As for MUNI vs MBTA, SF has much newer, faster trains, MBTA is like going back 40 years to rickety old trains and antiquated (but not quaint) stations. I suppose you disagree, and of course some of this is a matter of opinion, you might like your trains and you might like airport delays, traffic delays, shitty weather for 8/12ths of the year. One thing Cambridge does do better than SFO is universities. I'll give you that. Colorado makes better beer than either Cambridge or San Francisco, better still, English beer of course.

There's a reason why most startups are here, the brightest minds want to live here, after going to school there and getting sick of all the above.

Almost everything you say is blatantly incorrect with the possible exception nothing.

Boston's losing tech startups to SF because the weather here is drastically better (well, not today...)

All other things being equal, we have better beer, more sunshine, a bay that doesn't turn to ice in winter, an airport you can fly in and out of reliably without the constant storm closings, faster public transport and of course California Girls (1) :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuENHA1l_K0

google likely already know from your searches for Greek real estate and Ferrari cars. I'm sure search history analysis can reveal depression just as effectively.

you have to remember that the only microphones people have any exposure to in regular life is their phone. So it makes sense that any technology that uses a microphone be found in that device.

I agree totally, I switched to FF to see if that would help but sadly it doesn't. The data is awesome, but presentation really makes it impossible to see.

I wish the data were near real time, I knew this was a bad drought, but what I was hoping to see was what impact the last few rains have made on the supply.

because Silicon Valley is in California, it's supposed to be the world's hub of tech leaders. If we have a candidate pool that is so poorly educated it doesn't bode well for sustaining that technology lead.